If you create a particularly formatted *.doc file in Open Office, Amazon will convert it to Kindle with their online tools.

The tricky part is getting the table of contents and footnotes correct and "clickable". My wife did manage to get it to work. She used Neo Office on Mac.

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A328FYMFAE7VNY#word

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A17W8UM0MMSQX6

Knowing what I know now, if I were to do a book, I would definitely do the work of writing in a simply structured ASCII file in source control. I would have the title, author line, chapter headings, and section headings on separate space-separated lines and the content in discrete paragraphs without hard line breaks. Then, for the e-book, I would drop it into Open Office to do the formatted doc file for Kindle, or the formatted RTF file to feed Calibre for e-pub. For the print version, I would paste it into Lyx, set the page size, go through it to change the style types for the author, chapter heading, etc, and then render it to PDF.

If I had more programming and format conversion knowledge though, I think that the best method would probably be to write the book in XML, e.g. DocBook, and then use code to generate the above doc, RTF, and Lyx/LaTeX files.


-Adam


On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 4:11 PM, <dulsi@identicalsoftware.com> wrote:
>> Quick question... What format is your novel currently in?

One big text file. One blank line separates scenes. Two blank lines denote
the beginning of a new chapter. However the telepathic communications from
the potted plant are designated with '/'. My plan is use italic for them.

> What ever happened to Ascii?  Ascii is the AMERICAN
> Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Internationalization came. As someone who wrote the multilingual support
at work, ASCII is not good enough anymore. UTF8 or it relatives (UTF16,
etc.) are the only acceptable standards.

I keep calling for them to abolish the languages with weird character sets
but they don't listen to me. :)

Yes the text file is Ascii at the moment since it is UTF8 and doesn't have
any multibyte characters. As mentioned earlier the telepathic
communications need to switched to italic.

Could HTML be used for my needs? Certainly. The problem is what would the
user experience be. Could someone put it on their tablet/ereader and
easily resume where they left off, take notes, etc. That is why I want to
convert it to an ebook format. If I'm going to put it on amazon,
drivethrufiction or some other site it needs to converted at some point.

I like calibre and keep a large collection of rpg books in it. I'm not
convinced that handing it a libreoffice file (or other format) to convert
is the best solution. I downloaded writer2epub extension to libreoffice.
I've also looked at sigil user guide but haven't installed it yet.

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